This Blog is a part of my media social experiment. Comments, suggestions and questions are welcome (vv.free.physics@gmail.com). For the specific lists of posts use links on the right. For consulting services of Education Advancement Professionals visit www.GoMars.xyz. Thank you for visiting, Dr. Valentin Voroshilov.

Thursday, November 8, 2018

This post has two parts:1. An email to Dr. Ito;2. A discussion on the correlation between curiosity and take-risking. The parts are not really related :) the first one was just a spark for thoughts leading to the second.

from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/curiosity-killed-cat-louise-thomson/

Part I Dear Yuko Kobayashi Barnaby,

please, consider to forward this short letter to Dr. Ito,

Thank you.

Valentin
Voroshilov

______

Dear Dr. Voroshilov,

Thank you for your
letter to Joi. I'm sorry to hear that one of our associates never got back to
you. We have been receiving overwhelming letters, calls, and emails after the
60 mins episode.

I passed your letter to
Joi. He's also been extremely busy but he'll read your letter.

First, I would like to note that one of your employees seems has
no sense of curiosity J .

The other day I watched a video about the Media Lab, where I
learned that in order to get developed in the Lab an idea needs to be crazy
enough.

I sent a short invitation to one of your associates asking for a
short meeting where I could describe a crazy idea. I said that I would not ask
for following involvement in the development of the idea (if it would be deemed
as crazy enough, which it would) because it is outside of the area of my direct
professional interests. The idea is just a byproduct of the function brain, but
its applications may be of the use in the areas which the Media Lab explores,
and it would be just sad to see the idea dead.

Time passed by I had no response.

I understand the possible suspicion toward an unsolicited
suggestion which came from someone unknown.

But I represented my credentials, and a curious person could
quickly check me out and see that I am a successful professional with a diverse
experience (I always include a link with the full description of all my
professional experience: https://www.cognisity.how/2018/10/AtoZ.html).

I would not waste somebody’s time and would not contact if I would
not be sure that our meeting would be interesting for both who met.

However, there is even more important reason to me reaching out to
you than just “complain” on someone.

I believe that the Media Lab can add one more innovation to its
list.

It can demonstrate the power of matchmaking in the field of
venture capital.

Currently, in order to just have a meeting with a potential
investor a start-up has to walk a long path from the original idea to the team
building, developing a prototype, having initial testing, even having already
some clients.

Of course, this approach decreases the risk of losing money.

But it also increases the risk of missing out on an idea with a
great potential.

No one expects that a screenwriter would also be a talent agent, a
director, a producer, and an executive producer, not to mention all other
important “hats” required to make a movie.

The separation of duties is natural in many areas, even in science
(the idea of a laser came from the work of Albert Einstein, but a laser was
invented by T. H. Maiman).

But everyone expects that an author of an idea of a device would
also be the engineer, the manager, the promoter, etc.

An idea is a seed.

It is only a seed, but without that seed
there will be no tree.

Not everyone who has a good idea can grow it up.

Not everyone who has a good idea wants to plant and grow it up.

But what if everyone who has a good idea could share it with some
matchmaking entity (“ideas bank”), which would be able to find for that idea a
group of professionals (MBA grad students?) who would be interested in walking
the whole path from an idea to the product and beyond?

Maybe the M.I.T. Media Lab could pave the path to the realization
of this approach?

It would add to the Lab’s architecture of layers a new layer of
interoperability and increase its competition, cooperation, generativity, and
flexibility.

I hope your executive assistant Yuko Barnaby found this letter
interesting enough to pass it to you.

Sincerely,

Dr. Valentin Voroshilov
BU, Physics Department
"I hated physics before taking this course, and now after taking
both 105 and 106 with Mr. V, I actually really enjoy it. He is one of the best
teachers I've ever had. Thank you" (http://www.gomars.xyz/vvcvres.html)

The idea I wanted to offer to MIT is not presented in the videos, and remains to be "undercover". It is a very specific technical project that can increase the surviving abilities of special forces agents. I hope that one day someone will take interest in t it.

From a psychological point of view, curiosity is the manifestation
of either absent-mindedness (e.g. children, or adults who behave like
children), or of an ability to take a risk.I like sentence: "In order to be able to think you have to risk being offensive" by Jordan B. Peterson,
because ability to take risk is correlated with curiosity: only curious
people are capable of taking risk; people who play it safe have no
curiosity; only truly curios people who are not afraid of making a mistake ask "What if I'm wrong?".

Interestingly, in Russian there are two different words which represent
two different types of curiosity:

The type-two curiosity: любознательность /lyuboznatel|nost|/ = “love of knowledge” = the
manifestation of the ability to take a risk to learn something new.

For children, the “type-one” curiosity is the locomotive of their
exploration.

Later in life, depending on the quality of their education, when
growing up, childish curiosity may (or may not) transfer into the “love of
learning new things beyond the things which seem normal/natural”. People with
the type-two curiosity represent the bulk of scientists; however, working in a
scientific field does not automatically mean being a curios person.

Consciously following the feeling of curiosity takes guts to take
some risk.

“This does not look to me like anything I would consider normal,
but there is something in it making me take a risk and spend some time on
learning more about it”.

That is the “scientific curiosity”, the “type-two” curiosity, the
curiosity of risk-takers.

Because, deliberately using your time for something which may give
no real benefits is risky.

“Time is money” – remember?

When we chose for what our time to use, we are investing our time
into something we hope will bring back something good, beneficial to us.

Some people simply have no money to invest.

Some people invest only in a low risk entities with an (almost)
guaranteed return.

Some people divide their money between high and low risk
investments (in some proportion of their choice, based on their feeling “what
is safe/risky enough”).

And some people are willing to put all their money into one risky
endeavor (“all or nothing”).

And exactly same behavior people use when they decide what to do
with their time.

But usually with a much less consideration.

There is another human feeling which also motivates people to do
things and often is confused with curiosity – fascination.

Fascination is being attracted to something.

Risk or no risk, that is not even under a consideration; “I do it because
I want it”.

“I could invest my money into a salad/health, but I want that
burger, so I just want to spend my money to buy it.”Curiosity is one of the strongest motives for inventors and discoverers.An entrepreneur often starts from being fascinated by something.The stories of Apple (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak) or McDonald's (brothers McDonald and Ray Kroc) illuminate the difference between being an inventor and being an entrepreneur.

Fascination, not curiosity, motivates entrepreneurs to initiate
their project to fulfill their entrepreneurial impulses.

There is a common misunderstanding that an enterprise is always risky.

An enterprise may be difficult and may require effort, but not necessary
have to be risky.

“Effort” and “riskiness” belong to two different dimensions of
human practice.

Of course, when an entrepreneur initiates a start-up, no one can
predict that it will lead to a multi-million enterprise. But it does not necessary
mean that the entrepreneur is risking his or her life or well-being. Sometimes
it may, but in the last 20 to 30 years most commonly it is not.

There is one feature they all (or at least the vast majority of
them) share.

They came from families which were able to give them good
education.

For many – good enough to get accepted into a top university (and
drop it when they felt the strong fascination by the object of their entrepreneurial
dreams).

But what would happen if their enterprise failed?

Most probably, they would start another one, and another one (and some
did).

But it is very unlikely that they would ended up somewhere in an
alley, starving and shoving the needles in the body.

The worst-case scenario is they would not get as rich and famous
as they have.

The biggest risk they had to take is the risk of not becoming
rich. But if their enterprise would fail, they would still enjoy a rather comfortable
life.

That explains why the most of entrepreneurs have no developed sense
of curiosity.

They simply follow their fascination, even if it means spending their
own money on another “burger”
(feels good, though).

Curiosity would require deliberately set aside a time for things
or people who do not look fit into their perception of normality. But time is
money. The more one has, the less one wants to lose it.

The most important quality of every successful entrepreneur is not
his or her knowledge, technical skills, or even intelligence, but
communicability – an ability to convince people in their ideas (Appendix I of this post gives some insight on why).

There is one – and only one (!) – difference between a con man and
an entrepreneur.

That difference is (wait for it!) – intention.

A con man wants to convince people in something a con man knows is
false.

An entrepreneur wants to convince people in something an entrepreneur
believes is true.

And the living proof of this statement is the 45th
President of the United States.

There is one interesting effect caused by the fact that the most important
quality of a successful entrepreneur is communicability, which is a very common
fascination by a “90-second elevator pitch”.

By some reason (would be an interesting investigation – why) the
common entrepreneurial culture assumes that if an idea cannot be clearly expressed
within 90-second time interval, that is not a good idea. I, for example, doubt
very much that
John Davison Rockefeller’s pitch to potential partners and investors to create
Standard Oil was 90 seconds.

Every year an army of fresh entrepreneurs storm VC (who also always minimize their risks) with their 90-second pitches. Eventually, the good luck of being at the right place at the right time selects one of them to become the next peak of the Dirac delta-function of the financial success (the rest keeps on living, though). Which is great! He or she is getting rewarded for not giving up, for keeping moving forward. But should we always celebrate someone for merely walking the path in the right direction? If someone walks, we don't cheer merely for moving one foot ahead of another. If it is a child learning how to walk, or a person recovering after a car incident, cheering is appropriate. But otherwise? When thousands of gold diggers randomly selected patches, and one found a gold nugget, is it really his or her personal achievement or simply a good fortune?There is also a common expectation that
an entrepreneur has to know and do everything, from book-keeping, to product
design, to advertisement.

I think that is a very limited point of view, which may have been true 20 or
30 years ago.

I’ll write again, that no one
expects that a screenwriter would also be a talent agent, a director, a
producer, and an executive producer, not to mention all other important “hats”
required to make a movie. But everyone expects that an entrepreneur was an
author of an idea, an engineer, a manager, a promoter, and an accountant, with
a working prototype, with a stable audience of customers. And even that maybe
too risky to invest in.

And no one ever wants to invest in
an idea (the seed of any invention). Way too risky.

How many good ideas may have died
because the author could not or did not want to become an entrepreneur (Should
everyone be an entrepreneur? And people who aren’t – automatically of lower
human quality? => Appendix I)?

If
time is money, investing time may be as beneficial as investing money.

Everybody
knows that.

Investments
are risky.

Everybody
knows that.

However,
some risks are known, predictable in their unpredictability, allow making
several possible interpolations into the future, permit the analysis of various
scenaria. The mitigation of the possible negative consequences of those risks
depends on the experience of the managers. We should not really call such a risk
“a risk”, but use a different term, like an “uncertainty”, or a “decision
making hesitation”.

Other
risks – actual risks – are there simply because there is nothing to compare it
with.

Nothing
like that had happened in the professional history of the person who has to make
a decision to take the risk, or not to take the risk (the former CEO of
Blockbuster?).

Taking
such a risk means breaking your own rules/routine, which is “risk squared”.

And
that requires curiosity; people with
no curiosity do not risk.Another effect of the absence of curiosity is arrogance."Nah, there is nothing he/she can tell me I wouldn't already know or couldn't easily figure out".And then the Barbarians take over Rome.Or the Chinese take over AI (at least according to the Forbes).

Dedication

I want to thank Dr. Ito for his inaction which initiated the
internal discussion leading to this impractical piece.BTW: does "he is extremely busy" implies that we all are not? Business/Busyness is about how we distribute our time, not about having or not a lot of free time. Since the existence of a social hierarchy, people at the bottom of the pyramid tried to reach out to the people at the top (for many reasons). It has never been easy, and the technologies have not made it easier. On the contrary, the easy access to multiple media resources makes the streams of the bottom-to-top letters with pleads, ideas, requests overwhelming. Of course, that is what an assistant is for. But even for an assistant the incoming informational flow is way too much (BTW: an opportunity for an AI assistant; in my case, though, my letter when through an assistant to the boss). However, the most important reason for a "bottle neck" is the reason an assistant is an assistant. He or she simply does not have such skills, or abilities, or intuition, or visions, or good luck, the assistant's boss has - otherwise the assistant would not be an assistant. That leaves a boss to make a decision: either make deliberate attempts to step out the usual circle and level of communication, or not. The former, although very rare, but yet was observed, predominantly in politics (e.g. Henry V, at least according to Shakespeare). The latter is ubiquitous (like the "bugs" in PC/Mac/Android software, if only someone could write un-bugged/bugless AI, because bugged AI is pronged to the same mistakes/bugs people make when writing/thinking a code).

Entrepreneurs
represent a very important part of a society; they are responsible for the
change (hopefully to the better, a.k.a. progress). But it does not make them
any better than the rest of the people. The remaining 90 % of the population is
at least equally important; those are the people who let (or don’t let)
entrepreneurs make the changes they want to make.

Eliminate
all the entrepreneurs, and the society will run into a stagnation (until new
entrepreneurs will be born), but it will survive.

Eliminate
all the regular folks, and the society will cease to exists (contradictory to
the book of a Russian born writer Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosendbuam, also known
as Ayn Rand, who wrote “Atlas
Shrugged” - a beloved fantasy of every
conservative, a fine book, but still is a fantasy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand).

A
normally functioning society needs a certain number of entrepreneurs, but they
just can’t form the bulk of the society. To make a society stable, to keep it
away from chaos and anarchy, the bulk of a society has to be built from steady
functioning individuals.

Checks
and balances are important not just in politics; they are also important in
economy.

Everyone
who is not an entrepreneur needs to ask himself or herself a question: “I am
not an entrepreneur. Does it make me less important
individual?”

If
you say “Yes” – congratulations, the Republicans brainwashed you well.

If
you say “No” – congratulations, you have a potential to change the American
political landscape.

If
you said “No”, follow up by saying “I am an individual who lets our leaders to
lead until they keep their end of our
social bargain. I am ready to work hard. I will learn what I need. I will
do what I have to do. In return, I need to have a stable income letting me and
my family to live well above a surviving limit.”

The
social bargain between those people who make the society stable (90 % of the
population, let’s call them “doers”), and those people who make the society
move (10% of the population, let’s call them “movers”) should be very simple:

-
first, the “doers” get the resources sufficient for them to live well above a
surviving limit;

-
then, the “movers” can have the rest of the wealth.”BTW: everything we currently observe in politics is just a tip an iceberg. It is just an indication of how deep the process of deterioration went in all social and economic areas, including education, science, healthcare, infrastructure, media. Why? Well, that is a completely different discussion.

I
am not an idiot or a reckless person. The reason I can allow myself
writing what I think, even if that is perpendicular to commonly adopted
and conventional views, is that my financial situation is sufficient and
stable. Of course, as a normal person, I wouldn't mind making more money, or being involved in more interesting projects (as described in my generic resume). But I do not have to pretend to be someone I'm not to make my living.

Wednesday, November 7, 2018

I don't know the exact statistics but all highly achieved
athletes, as well as circus and ballet artists, begin they training at the very
early age.

I'm pretty sure that exceptions for this rule are very
very rare.

Of course, most of them also had some kind of a
genetic predisposition, a talent.

But they would have never achieved the heights of
their professional career without training which began when they were 5 or 6 years
old.

Naturally, the earlier the training begins the more
time one has to develop all skills necessary to succeed in the field. But the
real importance of early training is not just time one has to master the skills.
It is the fact that the early years of growing are the most important years for
the development of a human body. Starting training late means starting it when
the muscles and the joints become stiff and not flexible anymore, which of
course puts a person at the disadvantage compared to those who started early.

A human brain is essentially a muscle. It is a special
“muscle”, but anyway, it is a “muscle”.

A brain evolves, a brain changes itself, but more
importantly, a brain changes itself via/while/during mental actions a brain is
performing, a brain is going through.

That is why the first years of growing up are also extremely
important for a brain development.

Early exposure to reading, music, theater, sport, chess,
puzzle solving, construction games not only gives children some taste of
inventing things, and boost their imagination.

Early exposure to a variety of physical and mental
activities stimulates an intensive brain development.Early exposure to a variety of physical and mental
activities boost brain's processing power (i.e. the amount information it can process in a day, on average).

We all know folk wisdom "practice makes perfect". It is because practicing certain actions also boosts the development of the part of a brain guiding that practice (those actions). Hence, the variety of practices is as important as intensity and continuity of those practices. On the contrary, a dull repetitive training/drills,
like rote memorization, especial during the early school years, makes a brain stiff and incapable of performing
creative tasks (a good teacher v. a teacher).

“If the only exercise students had been doing for 12 years
is squats, they will not be good at push-ups and pull-ups. Do not expect from
students an ability to think if all the had to do for 12 years was memorizing
facts and rules.” (the
9th law of TeachOlogy).

When some politician or a media personality complains that "people do not use a long-term thinking" or "make decisions contradicting their own interests" they need to know that the only reason for that is poorly performed educational practices. A "ling-term thinking"requires (among others) an ability to perform a long multi-step logical chain of a cause-and-effect reasoning. That simply cannot happen for a person who on the third logical step forgets what was the first one. But a long-chain reasoning ability can be developed only as the result of years of practicing in different areas, different school subjects."Contradictory decisions", or "contradictory statements" (e.g. "another first kiss") represent an example of a disconnected mind, disconnected thinking, and is the manifestation an underdeveloped brain with parts which hardly communicate with each other.Rote memorization will not lead to the development of strong sustainable multiple connections in a brain.The top education practices should lead to the mastery of the knowledge and skill beyond just a set of Jeopardy-like facts. The top education practices should lead to the development of a scientific type of thinking.